CHAP. XXIII. WEAR OF COIN. 177 



the year 1825, when the panic in the commercial 

 world created a great drain, and dispersed the 

 larger portion of it. The experiments we are now 

 considering were conducted one year after that 

 panic, and though some of the gold coins upon 

 which they were made may have been coined nine 

 years before, they may not have been in cir- 

 culation more than a year or two. 



It would scarcely be an unfair mode of calcu- 

 lation to presume that the general mass of gold 

 in circulation in December, 1826, when this ex- 

 periment had been tried, had not circulated more 

 than two years, or two years and a half on the 

 average. If we take the average wear on the three 

 dates of 1817, 1821, and 1825 to have been of 

 three years and a half, eight shillings and ten- 

 pence per cent, will be the loss in that time, or 

 about one pound four shillings per cent, in ten 

 years. This would show a loss on that gold coin 

 at the rate of one part in eight hundred yearly. 



The report of the experiment of the mint does 

 not seem to be such as can be satisfactorily ap- 

 plied to general circumstances, not from any want 

 of accuracy, but from the peculiar period in which 

 it was made ; when the whole of our monetary 

 system was passing through a crisis which ren- 

 dered it unfit to become a scale for the measure- 

 ment of the loss which in other times and countries 

 occurs by the wear of gold. 



Any scale that can be framed must, however, 



VOL. II. N 



